AirSpaceMag.com

Zimmer’s Skimmer

Seven decades after it first flew, the V-173 got its old look back.

(Vought Aircraft Heritage Foundation Archives)

By
Paul Hoversten

September 16, 2013

In 1939, aerodynamicist Charles Zimmerman, who had joined Chance Vought two years earlier, built a two-foot-long, electric-powered model, the V-172 (above), to test his theory of a flying disk. His later creation, the V-173, had its roots in a 1933 competition at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (where Zimmerman then worked) for a civilian lightplane that would hover like a helicopter. Zimmerman's design—nicknamed the Flying Pancake, Flying Flapjack, and Zimmer's Skimmer—won the competition with its aerodynamic excellence and sound engineering. But NACA rejected the idea for further development because it was "too advanced."